Progress Monitoring vs. monitoring progress

01 June 2012

The term 'progress monitoring' has been floating around now more than even since the introduction of Response to Intervention (RTI). I attended a Title One Summer Institute three years ago (by @Beth Ware) who distinguished the difference between Progress Monitoring {big P, big M} and monitoring progress. Although the two may seem synonymous, Progress Monitoring is the formal intervention/documentation piece of the larger RTI puzzle where we assess students using CBM's (Curriculum Based Measurements) to show whether or not the intervention we are using with the student is working, and where Progress Monitoring is used as formal documentation of students working in Tier 2. We collect a baseline CBM score, we determine a goal, draw an aimline and collect weekly or bi-weekly data from the Progress Monitoring CBM probes. This type of documentation of Progress Monitoring can be done on paper, similar to the Otter Forms {also called Kid Talk forms} we created here at Lake Myra. {see sample below} If your school subscribes to the online software program, AIMSweb, like our district does, the Progress Monitoring can be done electronically using the Caseload Manager feature of AIMSweb. Another web-based program that is free and "easy" to use is www.easycbm.com, which is does give the variety of report options as AIMSweb but is certainly good enough to collect Progress Monitoring data. While researching for this post, I also found a new site called www.RTIGraphs.com. I don't know anything about it, but it does seem to be endorsed by Jim over at www.interventioncentral.com.

....monitoring progress on the other hand is a core instructional practice that involves monitoring the academic growth of all students. Here at Lake Myra, we like to ensure that ALL students are growing, from the low ones all the way up to the high ones because every child deserves a "year's worth of growth" no matter their baseline, and it's our responsibility to ensure that. We accomplish this in several different ways, at the classroom level, at the grade level and at the school level. Since classroom teachers at Lake Myra do not work in isolation, but in PLT's on "take ownership of ALL the kids" on the grade level, there are very few practices that one teacher does without all the teachers on the grade level doing it. A lot of these practices for monitoring progress are founded in the research of Robert Marzano, specifically, Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback, chapter 8 of Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. When students know what it is they need to do, specifically, to improve and grow, the more targeted and accelerated their growth will be. Think of a trip...if you know where you're going and how you're going to get there, you will have a better chance of reaching your destination on time or ahead of time if you stop and "re-calculate" at check points along your route. The use of common formative assessments created by grade level PLT's also help students, teachers and parents know which objectives they are learning and which ones they need to continued practice with. Graphs and tables like the following are used by students to graph their pre and post assessment throughout the quarter.

(the docx version is made using my font, Hello Firstie, which you can download in my right sidebar of this blog)

The first grade team monitors the progress of their student's high frequency word growth through the following Rainbow Words graph. This is the KEY to know which words are which rainbow color. This idea was brought to Lake Myra by Kelly Butler.

For the roughly 10-15% of students in need of Progress Monitoring of high frequency words, this crate and table sits at the end of the first grade hallway, where a TA works with students weekly to check growth and monitor progress.....

Rainbow Words on a Ring....where each rainbow word corresponds with the same color rainbow paper...

Everything to get Rainbow Words up and running is your classroom is HERE.

There are a lot of resources out there on Data Notebooks {that students keep} especially on Jessica Meacham's website, www.jmeacham.com under Assessments.

We also monitor overall reading proficiency of running record data using the Growth Lines we created several years ago...I blogged about our newly revised template at the beginning of the year in my Individual Reading Growth post... and I have updated the Growth Lines once again to reflect the Lexile "Stretch" Bands of the Common Core and the Expected Growth table by Fountas & Pinnell (both shown below). Here is the updated growth line with a link to a short screencast re-explaining how to use it.

You can download the .docx version here as teachers need to "move" the trajectory arrows based on the child's beginning of the year reading level.

(ok, so I have reached my 2G limit for the month on my free Screencast account, so this screencast is frozen until the month is up...but it will work again on July 1st, I'm sorry folks, please be patient...)

This Fountas & Pinnell chart can be found on the Heinemann site where F&P have provided alignment and supporting documents for the Common Core...you can see them {HERE}....

Something I created this year for students to monitor their library visits/reading activity was a Voracious Reader Goal sheet. I asked the media teacher to give me a print-out of student library activity in Destiny and I can see who's checking out books and who is not. This helps me have conversations with kids about books, and know who's struggling with finding their reading interests. This also brings to the students' awareness that checking out lots and lots of books is important and has an impact on their overall reading achievement.

In the past, we've had data walls in the office to monitor progress of students schoolwide, but we've found it's a very inefficient way to stay on top of school-wide growth by looking too individually....the PLT's do that and we monitor school-wide growth by using quarterly Measurable Process Checks (MPC's) for our SIP goal areas...here is an example of the quarterly data we collect. This information is not secret, but public on our school's SIP website. Have a look, if it helps you see how we hold ourselves accountable to monitoring the progress of all students and ensure that all students at Lake Myra are on a trajectory to make one year's worth of growth in reading, math and science...the three academic goal area of our School Improvement Plan.

Wow! Thank you so much! I am moving to first (from K) this upcoming year and this will be so helpful. I really want to help the students to self-monitor their progress too and you have provided some wonderful resources. Again, thank you!Holly

I love your blog! I teach high school math and am very involved in our RtI program. I got a lot of info out of your progress monitor samples, my goal for next school year is to get my students tracking their own progress! Are you familiar with Pat Quinn, "The RtI Guy"? I've been to two of his seminars and found him VERY informative.

What a great post. I've already pinned it to my classroom ideas board so that I can find it easily next year. I've been a long time follower of you on pinterest and I am now an official follower of your blog. I'm looking forward to going through and reading some of your previous posts.Stacy

I used the HELPS program last year with my students whose fluency was their greatest area of need. I went ahead and bought the whole program to save on copying the passages. It was amazing. The growth each of the students showed was incredible. They especially loved watching their progress each time on the graph. I started using graphs for each of my students in their specific area of need, and they were hooked! Great ideas here. Thanks for sharing!

My school LOVES your blog and we are constantly incorporating the things that you talk about into our classrooms. We began working with Power Strategies and Data Notebooks this past school year. I love your Fluency Graph and was wondering if you have a Word version that I could share with my school. Thanks so much!! Keep up the excellent work. :)

Dear eah08i, Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a comment and for letting me know how much ya'all get out of it! That's fantastic! Regarding the fluency graphs...absolutely! Here is a link to the .docx version of the fluency graphs http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9493103/Hello%20Literacy/Fluency%20Graph.docx...but first you'll have to download the font, (my font) Hello Firstie (I'm so proud of it, can you tell?)at http://2ttf.com/W3JpPZ2O

Teresa...I'm happy that you 'stumbled' over...those are the best finds, aren't they? I will check out your blog too! There is so much good stuff on the Internet and just not enough time in the day (and night). :-) Take care...Jen Jones

I LOVE your rainbow readers graph! I feel like I could use a similar idea for measuring progress across the content areas...thank you so much! Also, I like your voracious reader goal chart...I have a "Voracious Vocabulary" chart I use with reading too! Fantastic all round!

What an informative post. I will definitely be checking out more of your blog posts. I am a second year volunteer teacher teaching first grade at a bilingual school in Honduras. I hope to incorporate more progress monitoring into my teaching this year than I did last year.

I've see a few different ideas for sight word tracking (using color, putting the words on different animals) but I'm wondering what happens with these sight words in the class. The majority of the parents of my students are illiterate and only speak Spanish. I'm wondering how to integrate something like rainbow words into my class to introduce and help the kids progress through these lists of sight words. Any advice on when you use these sight word rings and how the students are assessed would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much and I will continue to explore this very helpful and informative blog!

Yes...we use the Otter Talk form at every grade. I will be uploading them all to my TpT store this week (for free) to share the RTI documents that our school created for the betterment of all teachers and students out there. Follow Me over at www.hellojenjones..com to get an email notification when I upload our RTI stuff.

Thanks so much for sharing this information, especially the charts for documenting growth and progress for reading and math. Our school has been doing RtI for a few years now, but we're still tweaking our processes.

This is great, but what do you do when the first grader can already read at a 6th grade level? What do you do for those kids? I am not trying to pick on your post. My 7 year old is homeschooling now. He has Aspergers and was bored so much at school last year. He would definitely know every word on this list and be able to spell a good amount of them. I just felt his school was failing him:(

Jen- great post! I know it's an oldie, but it's still a goodie! Quick question, on the Individual Reading Growth chart you have a lexile to letter conversion chart - where did this come from? Do you have an original link? I'd love to pass this on to teachers I work with!

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HELLO THERE!

Hello! My name is Jen Jones. I am passionate about literacy and research based best practices for 21st century literacy instruction. My goal for this blog is to provide high quality professional development in a casual, real-talk, teacher friendly way. When I'm not blogging about literacy instruction, I'm traveling the country providing face to face PD about best practices for literacy instruction or making & selling literacy products that make students think and make teachers better teachers. This is my goal.